


it's a love song

by anothercover



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Post-Canon Fix-It, Time Travel Fix-It, the mcu has red in their ledger so i guess i have to wipe it out, there's some orpheus and eurydice stuff going on in here
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-24
Updated: 2020-07-10
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:20:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24352006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anothercover/pseuds/anothercover
Summary: The need inside him is obliterating. It’s a black hole that is crushing the rest of his life up against the edges, squeezing them into whatever small spaces it hasn’t already eaten. He’s never felt desperation like this in his life; he knows he’s called out - that he’sbeencalling out. And he knows he damn well should be afraid of the thing that was finally intrigued enough to come answer.He opens his eyes, and there is a woman standing at the edge of the cliff. Standing in the spot where Natasha saved his life and killed something vital inside him in the same movement.The woman is not Natasha.Or: Clint Barton makes a deal.[PostEndgame.]
Relationships: Clint Barton/Natasha Romanov
Comments: 43
Kudos: 101





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Oh hey look, it's another one of those stories where I had to sit with canon for a full year before I processed and was finally ready to write this. I know I was in the middle of another series, but you've gotta write the thing when it's the one that's talking to you. And in this world of endless quarantining, trying not to go insane working from home, finding hobbies other than 'baking so many pies that I had to start giving them away to friends and neighbors', frankly I'm just happy that I wanted to write again at all. 
> 
> So here's what we're doing for a little bit. The other series will get finished when I can finish it; I'm just not in that space right now.
> 
> I also could not have written this without listening to Hadestown on repeat for roughly the last six months in my life; there are some Orpheus overtones here, but I just want to be clear upfront that it's not a retelling, in case other people out there feel as fragile as I do anytime Disney+ tries to suggest that they would ever be interested in enduring Endgame again instead of actively trying to pretend it never happened.

  
  
  


There is a sharp and deep fracture that the Avengers carved into the world.

As the population starts to try and reintegrate, assimilate, this is a truth that no one wants to say out loud: they didn’t fix the world, they just broke it in an entirely new way. Because now, there is always going to be a divide between the ones who were left behind and the ones who came back, and sometimes it can’t be bridged. 

For all that the grief was thick and encompassing, for all the ways the universe was drowning in it, this is another truth that no one is saying: not everyone moved on, no – but many people did. Many people figured out a way to build new lives out of the rubble, and it’s something that Clint couldn’t – see. Couldn’t comprehend himself, and it meant that his vision stopped just before the end of his nose. 

_Life goes on_. It’s one of those clichés that became a cliché because it’s true. Some people surrendered, some people drowned, and some people went on, because that’s what happens. They mourned – but they built new lives. They found new causes, new careers. People still fell in love. Children were folded into new families, parents brought home both the newborns and teenagers left without anyone to care for them. The climate crisis was on the verge of coming under control.

People found a way to be something again. They settled the ground back beneath their feet, and because the fucking Avengers couldn’t get over losing the world series, Natasha and Tony are dead and all those people, all the rest of the world, even the ones they brought back, they’re all now living through a different fucking nightmare. One that the team caused; something that’s concretely their fault, that isn’t just down to not being able to win a tough fight. 

This was intentional. This is why the road to hell was paved with good intentions, this right here.

 _We eliminated the threat_ is something Strange keeps saying, cool and matter of fact, and the thing Clint keeps wondering, the thing he wants to know if anybody besides him is thinking, is _wasn’t the threat already eliminated? The fight was over and The Threat blew up the stones himself and then Thor cut The Threat’s head off. The fight was done and we just didn’t want to accept we got fucking beat._

Not that he would have phrased it that way five years ago. Or four, three, two, one, a couple of months, not when everything inside him had curdled with the loss of his entire family. He’d let himself drown in the grief, too, he’d been one of the many who said _fuck this_ to even thinking about dealing with it. Once he would have said he’d given anything to get them back, anything for it to be the way it was. 

Once, he would have given anything. 

_Be careful what you wish for._ That’s another cliché. 

There’s this court case on TV he’s been following; that’s another thing that came back that the world was better off without, the sensationalism of human suffering, but the story’s blown up because there’s thousands just like it being duked out in judicial chambers across America right now, probably the rest of the world in some form or another, and it’s going to set precedent. 

They call it the Baby Eliza case, but Eliza Abshire-Bernstein is six and a really photogenic kid, which is probably one of the reasons the media latched onto this case. She’s got enormous brown eyes and curly hair, she looks like a kid who’s never been anything but adored, and in the photo snapped today in court and currently being shown on CNN, she’s clearly terrified, clinging to her mom’s neck as her other mom weeps openly into her hands. 

Eliza Abshire was barely four months old when both her parents dusted in the Snap. Grace and Gloria Bernstein found her when they mobilized a task force to sweep their city to rescue children in circumstances just like Eliza’s before it was too late – two of the civilian heroes in a post-Snap world. Even Clint in his haze of vengeance-blindness had heard stories about them. Whenever anyone memed something with the Mr. Rogers _look for the helpers_ quote, you inevitably saw the faces of Grace and Gloria Bernstein – and Eliza was the first child they saved. They fell in love with her. They adopted her themselves. 

But now the Snap’s been undone, and Ted and Eleanor Abshire – who didn’t exactly give her up for adoption, who tried for years and spent a considerable amount of money to get pregnant, who panicked when they blinked back into existence in their baby girl’s room and found no baby because no time had passed for _them_ , who had no fucking choice in the matter, who have already missed so much time with her, who by all accounts are perfectly lovely people – want their daughter. Who has no memories of them at all.

There are no bad people in the Baby Eliza case. It’s five people suffering that don’t deserve to suffer. Are the Bernsteins supposed to just turn over their little girl? Are the Abshires supposed to just give up and accept her loss as the price for their resurrection? 

Clint can’t sleep. He hasn’t really slept in anything but patches for weeks now, so he turns up the volume on the TV just a little. Some pundit is extrapolating that Eleanor Abshire’s problem with this might just be homophobia – instead of just, you know, the fact that she lost her beloved kid – and he’d roll his eyes if they didn’t already feel sore and gritty.

The world is divided into something different. Now it’s _who suffered_ and _who didn’t_. The people who came back have to pay an entirely different kind of price, and the fight now is all ideological purity tests of who’s got it worse. 

He rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands. It doesn’t help. The coffee on the end table next to him has gone cold, but he finishes it off anyway, thinks about walking up from the basement to brew more. The problem, of course, is that he doesn’t actually want to sleep, because he only ever dreams about one thing. His subconscious is a dog with a bone in his teeth, guilt and grief and sickness built so big that there is no room for anything else when he closes his eyes.

It’s not Freudian. It’s not even a dream; it’s a replay. When he sleeps, Natasha twists her wrist out of his hand and he hears the crack when she hits the bottom. He sees the blood pooling around her split skull, green eyes open and unseeing. He blacks out, comes to in a puddle with a glowing stone in his palm and knows it’s not a nightmare, it’s real, it happened – and then the dream rewinds itself and plays out again. He’s memorized the crack, he’s heard Natasha’s skull breaking so many times that he’s started to flinch whenever he hears someone snap open a can of pop.

Natasha did not give her life so that he could do this to himself. Clint has tried telling himself that a lot of times. 

He’s tried telling himself that the first night he was back at the farm, the first time he read Nate a bedtime story again, the first time Laura intimated that she was ready to make love again. This is why Natasha chose herself and not him: she gave him this back, she wanted him to clean the dust from the furniture in the farmhouse and clear the weeds from the fields and throw a baseball around with his sons. 

She wanted him happy. She wanted him to have what he wanted. What he had spent five years reinforcing that he wanted – 

That he wanted more than her.

And Clint feels like he’s living outside of his body. Like he’s watching it all happen at a distance. He thought – on some level, he thought the same thing so many other people in the world thought, that if they were just _back_ , it would all be okay again. It would clip back into place, and the last five years would just seem like a bad dream instead of what they actually were, which is _years of a life that he still lived_. Life never stops, it only feels like it does and in the end, the days still count. They add up. Even when they had all tried to freeze themselves in amber, things happened and grew or shrank and they _changed_ , he changed, and it’s wrong, everything’s wrong, all of it is only ever wrong, wrong, wrong.

All of it’s wrong and Natasha is gone and how was he supposed to fuck his wife when some quiet, sad voice in the back of his mind whispers _this might not have been worth the toll it’s taking._

Natasha didn’t die for him to be the same miserable murderous waste of space he has spent half a decade being. Natasha died because she thought it was the only way he’d ever be _Clint_ again. 

Joke’s on her. He has no fucking idea who Clint is without Natasha. 

“What do you mean, do I know my daughter’s allergies?” Gloria Bernstein asks on the stand, her voice wavering in the replay of her testimony. “Of course I - I’ve raised her for five years! I’m her _mother_.”

Clint drops his face into his hands and cries silently, so the rest of the house won’t hear.

* * *

He’s back on Vormir in the dream, a thick sleep finally brought on by the demands of his body, but still an uneasy one, like he’s only just below the surface of the subconscious and he could push up at any second.

It’s cold. It always is.

It smells sharply mineral, like iron and salt. It always does. 

But now Clint’s standing on the black cliffs alone. No dispassionate guardian silently observing from the sidelines. No Natasha, with her long braid and her shoulder pressing into his and for a moment, there’s a fleeting grasp of panic that threatens to pull him out of this patchy sort of sleep. He will never get to see her again, not for the rest of his life, not anywhere else except for this repetitive nightmare, and if she’s gone from even here – 

“You called me.”

He whips around, the icy air lashing at his cheeks and his shorn scalp. There’s no one there, just the purple tilt of the setting sun – or maybe it’s rising, he’d have figured it out long ago but for the fact that he doesn’t want to be an expert in anything about Vormir, he wants to forget it exists entirely even if it’s all he’s got left to hold onto. 

“ _You called me_.”

The voice is terrible and it is beautiful. It runs like silk over the craggy, jagged edges of this mountain, burrowing into every secret little crevice, and Clint wants to clap his hands over his ears to block it out. 

“You called me, Clinton Francis Barton, and now I’ve come.”

Terrible. Beautiful. On the wind, whispering through the rocks, pushing itself up through the ground, and he’s afraid, suddenly. Edith Barton was a superstitious woman and as much as he’s tried to leave his childhood in the past where it belongs, some things stick around. 

She taught him that you don’t call out unless you’re sure you want an answer. 

The need inside him is obliterating. It’s a black hole that is crushing the rest of his life up against the edges, squeezing them into whatever small spaces it hasn’t already eaten. He’s never felt desperation like this in his life; he knows he’s called out – that he’s _been_ calling out. And he knows he damn well should be afraid of the thing that was finally intrigued enough to come answer. 

He opens his eyes, and there is a woman standing at the edge of the cliff. Standing in the spot where Natasha saved his life and killed something vital inside him in the same movement. 

The woman is not Natasha. 

Her hair is long and black and tangled, tumbling all the way down to her elbows. The irises of her eyes are silver, not subtle grey – they’re melted mercury. It’s deeply unsettling when he realizes her irises are rippling liquidly, like someone skipped a rock over a lake, and Clint’s stomach churns when he looks down and see that slender green vines are weaving and unweaving themselves absently around her fingers and around her wrists. He thinks for a minute that they might be garden snakes (he fleetingly wonders exactly what about that would be _more_ comforting), but they’re vines. Every few seconds, they bloom out into tiny white blossoms that scatter a shower of clean petals along her bare feet. The leftovers brown out and shrivel themselves back up into the vine before budding white all over again, a constantly looping time lapse. 

He’s seen weirder. They all have. This universe is bigger than anyone would have believed, monsters and magic and myth, but when the silver-eyed woman smiles an unexpected smile, it’s like…

It’s like watching Thor carve a swathe through Coulson’s guys all over again. It’s like he’s a kid getting his first taste of something that he knew was going to mean real trouble. 

Clint wets his lips. “This a dream?”

“You called me,” she repeats. “You call me sleeping as much as you do waking. Your heart is a _screamer_. Which I think you know.” On her last word, a white blossom the size of Clint’s fist bursts from one of her vines, so huge and quick and sudden that there’s almost a strange violence to it.

It dies the same as the rest, though. She steps toward him on the carpet of clean petals that have laid themselves out for her, and when she’s close enough to touch, he sees she wears a crown, tilted crookedly on her head and almost lost in the wilds of her black hair. 

Her crown is a complicated interlocking series of finger bones, bleached white and woven through with pretty little violets, and suddenly Clint knows her name as though some external force has shoved it into his mouth. If he called to her, it wasn’t a deliberate summoning. There is no reason he should know.

But he knows.

“Persephone,” he says. 

The queen of the underworld smiles at him. Her lips are very red. 

“We’ll make a deal, Clint Barton,” she promises. “I’ve met your type before. Less often than you’d think, but still.”

* * *

When he wakes up the next morning, a turned-coffee sourness in his mouth and a knot between his shoulders from passing out in an armchair, Lila is sitting on the basement steps, watching him.

A deep flush of shame starts somewhere at the back of Clint’s neck. He wonders – not for the first time - how he looks to his daughter these days. She’s the same as he’s always remembered, but he’s not Dad the way she always knew him. He’s five years older, leaner and with harder eyes, hair spiked up and one arm a sleeve of tattoos that seemed like a good idea when he needed to wear his rage on the outside. He looks frightening, now.

He’s a father now and for the rest of his life, but sometimes he’s wondered if he’s forgotten how to be a dad. If he’s ever gonna remember.

In the worst moments, he wonders if he really wants to remember.

 _We brought you back for ourselves, not for your own sake, and I’m sorry, I’m so sorry for what that choice is putting you through_ , he thinks, and it doesn’t even feel uncomfortable to think it anymore; Clint’s had enough time to sit with what the Avengers did, sat with it long enough to know it tastes like the truth. His daughter. Look at the fucked up world he’s built for her to withstand. 

“Hey, kid,” he says, trying to sound normal as he straightens up, tries to rub the sleep out of his eyes, the bones and blossoms out of his brain. “What’s up?”

“It’s past noon,” Lila tells him. “Sorry. Mom said not to wake you.”

“Nah, you didn’t.”

She nods and drums her fingers against her knees, uncomfortable with the silence, and it’s a pang somewhere low in his gut. You bond differently with all of your kids, Clint knows by now, it’s not a matter of favoritism, but with Lila, it’s always been the easiest. His daughter has always been such a delight to him, such an endless source of pride. They’ve never been uncomfortable with each other. 

He’s never wanted any of his kids to look at him the way he knows he used to look at his old man – like he’s someone they don’t know. Lila’s seeing somebody her instincts are telling her she needs to be wary of, and he doesn’t – he doesn’t begrudge her that, because he knows what he’s reflecting. He’d do the same in her place. His smart girl.

It doesn’t help that the house still feels haunted. It still feels like an abandoned place even with all five of them to fill it up again, no matter how much Laura’s been battling the bleakness with bleach, fresh paint, newly-sewn curtains.

This was supposed to be the cure. This was supposed to make it better and instead, it’s just awful in an entirely different way. When Clint sleeps at all, he sleeps in an armchair in the basement while his wife is alone in their room upstairs. His grief and guilt and rage have built a such a goddamn barrier between himself and the people he thought he needed to be normal.

He rubs a hand over his face and promises himself for the hundredth time that he’ll try harder. “Want some lunch? I could take down a pretty massive grilled cheese right now.”

Lila hesitates then shakes her head. “I just – I wanted to say something.”

“Okay,” Clint says, after a second. “What’s up?”

“I wanted to say that I miss Aunt Nat, too,” she tells him. Her voice cracks and it’s like he’s taken a punch he didn’t see coming. “Just – Mom said we shouldn’t talk about it. She said this is hard enough for you, but I thought, I thought you might think it was just you, Dad, and it’s not. I think about her all the time, and I know we’re supposed to say she’s a hero and that she did something amazing but this is _bullshit_ , it is, it’s all bullshit, Daddy.”

Clint holds his arms open without a word. Lila comes to him like she’s a little girl again, folds herself up on his lap and makes herself small as she cries into his shoulder. 

There’s a relief in the way Lila cries, though. There’s a catharsis in letting out the words she’s bottled in, letting herself pretend he’s still the dad who could make everything better, and even as he rubs her back, holds her through it and lets her grief spill from her, it does nothing to ease the weight of his own. Sharing it isn’t a halving; it’s just an absorption. 

_We’ll make a deal, Clint Barton._

That silky whisper shivers through him like it was whispered it right in his ear.

* * *

There are a lot of things Clint will never tell Laura about the five years he spent without her.

Which, honestly, is generally par for the course in their marriage. That’s how a civilian and a wetworks operator rack up numbers, a decade and a half of marriage plus three pretty good kids. You don’t put those kind of stats on the board without a lot of omitted details and plausible deniability. If he wanted to preserve some small part of his soul, something untouched by the job he’d signed on for at eighteen, well, that had been what the farmhouse was for. It was a lockbox, and he didn’t bring back the stuff that would taint it. 

This farm was not a place for the war stories. It was what he could tap on when he wondered if he’d drifted too far from _normal human_. Children’s laughter and chicken pot pie and clean sheets and Netflix marathons and rusty tractors – if he held onto that, he always had the option to be something besides the archer who could hit a target through the eye and feel no particular type of way about it other than _sweet, Nat and I can knock off early and grab a decent dinner tonight_. 

That disappeared if he talked to Laura about the particulars. Even back when things were good, he sometimes thought – no, call it what it is – he was absolutely certain Laura never would have married him in the first place if she’d ever really understood him. And the last five years are an especially gory chapter. 

He will tell Laura about almost none of it, not even when she asks, not even when she begs, but there’s one thing that outranks the rest of it. 

When the dust had settled – no pun intended, the literal dust – he’d made his way to the complex in New York. It was long over by the time Clint showed up, of course; by then, the whole world had at least a little clarity on what had gone down. By then, Tony and Pepper had fucked off days ago, the mad titan was rotting on some other planet courtesy of Thor, and in Clint’s wild beeline to New York, he hadn’t tried to get in contact with Natasha even once. 

It was his lone thin thread of sanity. Once – what felt like a hundred years ago – Nat had gotten spectacularly drunk on cheap vodka and gone off on a rant about Schrodinger’s cat. The thesis of which had been that it was a shitty thought experiment because the cat was alive or it was dead, period, it wasn’t both just because nobody knew the answer. It was never both. _Some things – not many things, but some things are binary, Barton. Some things just are_ , she’d said with a sharp point of her finger, then hiccupped with an impressive amount of dignity. _Stuff’s either alive or it’s dead. And I like that some things are binary, s’nice_.

But knowing she would have hated this logic did not stop Clint from clinging to it, because as long as he didn’t try to get in touch with Natasha, then she was fine. That was how it had to work. As long as he didn’t call and get no answer, she would be there, she would be waiting for him, there would be one person, just one, he would not have lost everything in one swoop, but if he called and she didn’t pick up, he did not trust himself to not hit the gas and steer directly into the nearest tree.

Everything was too silent and still when he pulled the truck up to the compound; he’d probably been heard miles off. By the time he’d slid out from behind the wheel, exhausted and starving and more than a little shaky, Natasha had burst out the side entrance and was careening towards him in a wild, graceless sprint. Like she’d gone running the second she’d heard the engine. 

Like she’d been remembering her drunken cat rant, too. Like he wasn’t the only one too afraid for hope.

Clint couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen Natasha do something gracelessly, but by then she was in his arms. They’d hit the graveled ground together, and he was heaving wordless and wet into her neck even if tears weren’t quite coming. She clutched him so tightly that when he’d taken a shower much later, there were scattered bruises at his ribs. 

They didn’t need words. Why would they? She knew what it meant if he showed up alone.

For a couple of weeks, he’d stayed. What else was he gonna do? 

They had all tried, but Natasha – oh, she had worked overtime. Natasha, suddenly thrust into the roll of de facto leader because it was the first time any of them had ever seen Steve Rogers so entirely at a loss and Tony had made it clear that while the financial endowment stood, nobody had better so much as fucking text him. Nat, rounding up their scattered remnants and doing what she could do to help the world get to limping, to help with peacekeeping, directing flow of resources and personnel, having long strategy conversations in the room that would eventually become her office with Carol Danvers and Rhodey. Nat, trying to make this place a home for Nebula and Rocket, asking after what they needed that Earth didn’t provide and working out substitutes, offering them a road map to assimilation. 

Nat with puffy circles under her eyes and yet somehow _tireless_ and available, to everyone, always, for anything, at any time. Finding an answer to every question, a solution to any problem even if it was just a stopgap or a temporary measure. 

Clint had been mostly useless, drowning in his own grief and unable to imagine much of his life beyond the next hour or so, but – he noticed. 

Finally one night, he’d gotten up and decided to cook, more for need of something to do with his hands than anything else. Food production and distribution across the country was still inefficient, but in spite of their numbers, they were well-provisioned at HQ, and Clint had settled on chili, because it was easy but it was also involved. It was chopping and simmering and measuring and mixing, and at some point, he looked up and realized the smells had drawn the other survivors to the kitchen. 

Slowly, one by one, they’d all found some task to pick up, like they all wanted to be together but still felt like they needed a concrete reason to cluster. Carol started working the blender, muddling frozen margaritas in flavors that ranged from spicy to sweet. Steve knew how to make chocolate chip cookies, Bruce cut elaborate carrot curls and radishes into flowers for something that looked way too artful to be called a salad. Rocket opened bottles of wine and beer and washed cookware, and while everyone was working mostly in silence, aside from the occasional _can you open the oven_ or _are you done with the flour_ , it was – warm. Compatible. 

Natasha, Valkyrie, and Thor had spent entire day on a video conference with the new Norwegian parliament, their third straight day of negotiations to secure the land grant for what would one day become New Asgard. When she’d walked into the kitchen, probably just to grab a quick snack before heading back into the office to plow through whatever was next on her legal pad…

She had looked astonished, and then in the next instant, like she might cry. He could read relief in Natasha from a thousand feet; hadn’t that always been what she’d wanted, to keep everyone together?

For one brief moment, Clint thinks she must have felt like her work was paying off.

They’d all filled plates and piled into the living room, overlooking the lake while the sun went down. And one by one, they’d all started sharing reminiscences. A lot of _remember that time when_ , a deep dive into the good old days. They all had a little too much to drink, they’d all even done some laughing – it was the closest thing to holding a funeral for the fallen that they were ever going to manage. 

Clint had looked at Natasha – capable, clever, achingly beautiful Natasha – tucked under Steve’s friendly arm and slurping at one of Carol’s jalapeño margaritas that everyone else had deemed undrinkable. Every challenge the world had presented in the last several weeks, she had met with the firm beliefs that it was her responsibility and that just because she didn’t know how to do something didn’t mean she couldn’t figure it out. His partner. His person. His best friend. 

There was no one left in the world who was this dedicated to the people in it. There was no one more faithful. Did anyone else notice this about her? Could anyone else understand how lucky they were that Natasha just – _was_ this way, that she had stepped up and put things into order while the rest of them just tried to get through a day?

They had been drunk, but when they’d walked back to the living quarters after the impromptu gathering broke up, it had not been an accident when Clint had kissed her at her bedroom door.

She hadn’t stopped him. She had thrown herself into it as hungrily as he had, there had been no discussion, nothing weighed out and agreed upon, no pause button pressed to give them space to acknowledge that this was a terrible idea. 

Instead, they fucked wordlessly, ripped into each other for so many different reasons that even now, Clint doesn’t think he could catalogue them all. Drunk, exhausted, sorrowful, directionless, and he knew even then, with all that stacked up against him, it was – it was still easily the best sex he’d ever had, his whole life, it shouldn’t have been possible but there it was. It was like he’d just learned how it was supposed to work. 

His family had been gone for three weeks. 

When he woke up the next morning, Natasha was still sound asleep. She’d rolled onto her stomach, with half her face buried in the pillow, covers pooled at her hips so he could see the curve of her back, the top of her hips.

She didn’t look especially lovely or capable right then; her still-blonde hair was a mess and she was drooling open-mouthed into the pillow, pores a little greasy from the booze and eye makeup smudged from no opportunity to take it off. She looked like any ordinary woman sleeping in after a long night, but the fresh dawn was peeking in from under the curtains, dappling her body in peach and rose and clementine. He knew her skin would be warm if he trailed his fingers over her spine. He knew what her smile would be if he slid from bed and brought her coffee and water, a piece of toast and two Advil before she woke. 

Even now, he could see the potential for beautiful things that the world could still hold. 

The other side of sunrise this very morning, that was teeming with possibilities. Last night – the dinner and wine and the laughter with friends, that, too, could hold a new beginning for all of them, if they would let it. That could be the moment they allowed themselves to start healing instead of a one-off. Today was a day everybody could remember to try.

Clint could see it like it was a movie that he knew by heart. Could see this life that he and Natasha might build together on the back of that hangover smile; no one left alive was going to judge them for this, not for a second, he already knew. There would still be awful days, rage-filled ones, depression bouts and stages of grief still left to work through, but here was a beginning, offering itself to him, and it could look like himself and Natasha building the life that he knew goddamn well he had wondered about so many times; fantasized about, even, and more than that, knew he wasn’t the only one who wondered and sometimes wished. 

He could see regular group dinners and grieving, taking a more active role in restoring order to the world. Could see himself getting to know the new recruits better, teaching some things and learning a hell of a lot more. Nights and days with Natasha – coaxing her away from work when she needed it, rubbing her back and sharing a bed and starting over with somebody who’d always known everything about him and still wanted….

And self loathing began to flood through him, then, like he’d swallowed a bottle of it. 

His children were dead. His wife. He had been unable to save them; he was the only one left. Was he sitting here trying to think of a _silver lining_? What in the actual fuck made him think he _deserved_ healing? 

What made him think anybody deserved to look at this world and see anything beautiful in it? What was he _thinking_ , that the only work left for him to do was try to get on with his life? 

This wasn’t justice. None of it was. 

They had all failed and half the fucking universe had blinked out as a result of this. No one in this building should be allowed off the hook for it. No one should get to test forgiveness, softness – no one got to try and build a future. 

He got up. He left Natasha asleep in her bed. He didn’t look back.

The next time he saw her, somehow it was five years later. A rainy night in Tokyo, a back alley with too-bright neon signs. A promise that she was going to get him the people he needed; too late, he understood that even if she knew he loved her, she’d crossed herself off his _need_ list a long time ago.

And then. And then. And then.

* * *

“You need to get help,” Laura says. “I love you, babe, I love you so much and I know it isn’t your fault and I am so sorry for everything you’ve been through, but _you have to get help_.”

The unspoken _or I can’t let you be around our kids anymore_ lingers so pointedly that she may as well have said it. 

“Yeah,” Clint agrees. 

Only at all the other times he’s needed help – Odessa, Rome, that time with the flash-bang that left him temporarily blind for a week, Loki, pick it – the person that’s come to deliver it and pull him back to where he needs to be is Natasha, and they’re shit out of luck on that front. 

He may as well have said that, too, because he knows she heard it. 

Laura’s eyes are glistening and they’re just two more people trapped in a situation like the players in the Baby Eliza case. A hopeless shitty maze with no good answers, nobody who knows what to say and nobody who wants to be the bad guy even if nobody can quite be the good guy, either.

* * *

When he can manage sleep, he dreams of Persephone again and again and again.

The fourth time, he finally snaps at her. “Are you having fun creeping me out all the fucking time, or are we eventually going to get around to this deal you keep telling me you want to make?” 

She smiles. He wishes he had something to throw at her. 

“I’m having fun,” she tells him. “But we’re getting closer. I promise.”

* * *

Pepper Potts calls awhile later to see if Clint’s willing to loan her a hand for a few days. She’s unloading the cabin where she and Tony lived for the last five years, taking Morgan and moving back to Los Angeles, where she’ll be, once again, picking up the mantle as the head of Stark Industries after a very long hiatus. The world is in a different kind of chaos now and the board was desperate for a trusted name who’d already proved to be a steady guiding force for the company in trying times. Pepper didn’t even bother to play hardball with the negotiations, just agreed and gave them her preferred start date.

In all the years of the Avengers being a thing, Clint and Pepper were never actually close personal friends. Never friends at all, really – he liked her just fine, but pre-Tony’s funeral, he can remember maybe two conversations they’d ever actually held, and those were about surface level stuff. Now, though, on the other side of everything, they seem to be the only two people still drowning in a sea of bitterness and resentment. 

Pepper, he figures, loved Tony deeply, and understood him as much as anybody did, and now that she’s staring down the barrel of a life spent single-parenting a kid that looks just like him while the world around her is still loudly and inescapably mourning Iron Man, those things have started to calcify into a certain degree of anger at him for the circumstances she’s found herself in. Anger’s easier than just about anything else, and besides, it’s not exactly unfair.

Clint gets it; he’s happy to trek out to the middle of nowhere and help her get the place ready for sale. “I can’t bear to look at it anymore,” she tells him over the phone, but her voice is flat and without affect. Pepper and Clint still aren’t exactly friends, but they’re also the only two people who seem to understand – and not judge – where the other is currently coming from. “To be perfectly honest, I’d rather burn it down with everything inside it, but the land is worth at least three times as much with a small developed property on it. Go figure.”

“Yeah, how else would you ever send Morgan to college,” he deadpans, and Pepper snorts. He appreciates it, though; appreciates that it’s just cold analytical data driving her decision. 

It’s somewhere to go, at least for awhile, and it spares Laura from having to ask him to leave. He takes Nat’s bike for the trip, even though it’ll take a lot longer to arrive, but he can’t stomach the idea of being cooped up on a commercial flight with all those people.

When Clint pulls up to the cabin, there are heavy rainclouds threatening to burst overhead that he may have just beaten. He’s surprised to find Pepper waiting on the front porch, pristine and untouchable in an ivory wool suit with black buttons. Her bangs are so symmetrical they look vaguely weaponlike; her delicate gold chain and matching earrings probably cost more than the motorcycle he rode in on. She looks like she’s playing a queen in a modern-day boardroom reboot of Game of Thrones. 

“I was under the impression this was going to involve a little manual labor,” he says, tucking his helmet under his arm. 

“It is, and I’m sorry,” Pepper tells him. “I can change and start to help in an hour or so. I scheduled a last minute interview with the dean and the director of the school where I’m planning to enroll Morgan. Not that our name didn’t essentially kick the door open on its own, but you know how these kind of places feel about formalities.”

“Sure,” Clint says, though he doesn’t. He never got a diploma himself and his kids went to the local public school that handled every grade up through ninth; there was one principal who was also in Laura’s book club and deans weren’t a thing. Morgan’s four at the most; he wasn’t even aware there _were_ private schools for kids that young. _The rich really are different_ , he thinks. “She here? Morgan, I mean.”

“No, she’s in Los Angeles with Happy while I’m wrapping things up. They’re attempting to break in the new nanny,” Pepper says. “Cross your fingers that the fourth one will be the charm. Morgan’s not a big fan of California.”

“It’s a different life for her. For you both,” Clint says sympathetically. It does not escape him that even on the entirely different playing fields where they operate, it’s still a thousand times easier to relate to Pepper than it is to Laura now.

“I just wish Happy would get off my back about – a lot of things. I can’t bear to let him spend less time with her, but I’m doing the best that I can and he doesn’t actually get an equal vote in my parenting decisions,” she sighs.

Pepper pushes open the door, and almost immediately Clint understands why she can’t live here anymore; why she didn’t want to be alone and called someone who’s still not much more than an acquaintance to her for company on the guise of needing help. This place is a cathedral to Tony Stark’s presence; if Clint had been dropped in here with no previous knowledge and asked to guess who’d lived here once, he wouldn’t have even hesitated. It’s not even just the big things, the evidence of little projects that piqued his curiosity, the way he could turn any space into a workspace, the way his mind made room for him to tinker and doodle and think everywhere. It’s the little touches, it’s the color schemes and the coziness, it’s the Black Sabbath sweatshirt thrown over the back of a chair, the tools all over the tables, the small devices and screens and touchpads that just made life easier – 

The version of Tony who lived here was happy. For awhile, anyway.

For a second, Clint is so thoroughly, completely grateful that Steve was the one who undertook sorting out Natasha’s spaces back at the compound before he fucked off on the whole team completely. He doesn’t know how Pepper’s still upright. 

But he knows better than to say so.

And when he turns to look at her, he can see that even from the porch to the entryway, she’s gone missing; she has cut off the part of her that could respond to this. Entirely. She has severed it and stored it on ice. Pepper Potts isn’t here with him right now; this is the CEO of Stark Industries who makes decisions from data and who has an appointment to get her daughter into the right school starting soon. 

“I’ll be upstairs on the call for awhile,” she says, crisply. “There are things here I’ll want to keep, things Morgan should have one day, things that should go the R&D labs, and things we can just start donating. Would you mind if I left you to build some boxes and maybe start sorting out the books in the living room? Keep any of Morgan’s picture books, but everything else can go into a donation pile. Silly job to start you on, but I can’t think of anything else I won’t need to look at first.”

“No problem,” Clint tells her. “Go ace that interview.”

“Thank you,” Pepper says; there’s a shimmer of real gratitude there, and then the sound of her sharp heels clicking on the wooden staircase. 

For awhile, it’s repetitive and soothing. Just work for his hands, Clint thinks, no complicated emotional tangle, no thrum of agony every time he has to remember how to interact with someone he loves like he’s a person. The fold and crunch of cardboard, the stretch and snap of the packing tape along the bottom, the solvent Sharpie smell as he scribbles labels onto flaps. There are hundreds of books filling two huge built-ins, none of which are in any kind of order, and there’s something satisfying about correcting it. 

There’s a lot of picture books, like Pepper said there would be, but both she and Tony were voracious readers with a wide range of interests; there’s paperback bestsellers and astronomy textbooks, memoirs and birdwatching guides, short story collections, vintage hardcovers that are probably worth a shitload of money, cookbooks, a giant collected works of Tolkien that weighs ten fucking pounds…

Clint leafs through a couple of them, fanning out the pages just in case something slips out. Pepper didn’t tell him to do it, but Tony was that kind of genius who scribbled on everything, and Clint doesn’t want to chuck out an old paperback if Tony wrote an equation that would cure cancer onto the back of a receipt, then used it for a bookmark and forgot about it. Upstairs, he can hear the calm, professional cadence of Pepper’s voice even if he can’t make out words and the tap of the rain on the windows, now that the clouds have broken.

It is the closest thing to peace he has felt since Vormir. He’s aware for the first time in a long time that he’s hungry – actually hungry, not just aware that he needs to eat as a basic human function, which is almost a pleasant realization. A sandwich sounds good, maybe even a piece of fruit. Fresh coffee. They’re going to be here for a couple days and Pepper’s very organized, so he’s pretty sure the fridge will be well stocked. 

He’ll wait til her call wraps up, he rationalizes as he idly thumbs open a leatherbound book of poetry. The leather’s cracking and the title is written in gold leaf that’s peeling so that he can't make out the author – one of the vintage books, this one probably worth less than the others because of its condition. The pages are coming loose from the binding; he’s barely flipped them when something flutters out and lands on his lap. 

It’s a photograph. An old one, by the look of it, the snapshot is in black and white and only about the length of his finger, a thin layer of plastic on either side of it held in place by tape that’s long since dried out. 

Clint almost doesn’t look. It will haunt him later, thinking about what a near thing it was that he almost didn’t look – but he does.

It was taken in a yard; there's one wall off to the side that looks like part of a house, but it’s a little blown out in the glare from the sun reflecting white onto the camera. One man is in the corner of the photo; tall and thin, in a light colored vest, a dark tie, and a white dress shirt rolled up to his elbows. He’s looking at the camera with a fond exasperation. 

On the lawn beside him are two women, kneeling with an enormous puppy between them; a Bernese mountain dog, Clint thinks, the size of a small pony. The first woman has curls in a messy pile atop her head, a flowered dress, and a wide, lipsticked smile open in a silent laugh. Her arms are flung around the dog’s neck as though she’s trying to hold him in place for the other woman to clip a leash onto his collar. 

The other woman is Natasha. 

Every hair on the back of Clint’s neck stands up.

He drops the photograph into his lap, his heart kicking into a roar so quickly that he should, by all rights, pass out. It takes him a minute to come back, to breathe. To try and remind him that he’s lost her and he hasn’t even begun to deal with it yet, not really, so of course he’s seeing her in places she isn’t. He’s sleep deprived and hungry and serotonin is something his brain thinks it might have heard of once as a fairy tale. 

He lifts it to look again, and it is still Natasha. 

It is the curve of her lips, the tiny beauty mark on her cheek, the little line of consternation in her forehead when someone won’t cooperate with her. She is in a loose dress with capped sleeves, her hair shoulder-length and waved and dark again, and he’s certain as if she was in front of him. 

Clint can taste blood in his throat, like his heart is trying to slam itself up from behind his ribs. He shuffles through the rest of the book so ferociously that pages tear, but nothing else shakes loose, there’s nothing else, no clues or hints and in desperation, he flips the photo over.

That’s when he realizes that this is not another dream. He is on the woven rug in Tony Stark’s lakeside cabin, holding a photo taken almost eighty years ago where his dead partner is playing with a dog on a landscaped lawn.

The ink on the back has faded, but it’s legible enough to read. 

_Edwin, Ana, Natasha, and ever uncooperative Merlin._

_1947._

  
  
  


to be continued.

  
  
  



	2. Chapter 2

  
  
  


War is trembling on the horizon and no one’s said it, but they’re thinking it: _if the time heist doesn’t work, this could be our last night on earth_. A collective thought with so much concentrated force behind it that it could probably be picked up on some fuzzy radio frequency. Someone could spin a knob in their truck a thousand miles away, flip through static until the words blow a ghostlike rattle across the airwaves. _Last night on earth, last night on earth_.

It’ll be true, for some of them. 

Natasha’s sure of that much, her unflinching pragmatist’s brain unwilling to sugarcoat it even in the privacy of her own head. More people she loves could be dead by this time tomorrow - _more_ , and she’ll have to learn how to absorb more loss. 

Or this time, she might be among their number.

It’s strange to have so much time to process: a full night before the coming red dawn. Life and death situations usually have a tendency to rush in all at once; no slow creep like a migraine. Whenever she’s hurled herself headlong into a maelstrom, there’s never been space for consideration of anything beyond the moment. 

Now the plans have all been made, checked, restructured, and there’s nothing left to think on besides the way her life adds up, all the years piled on top of each other. The final tally: people she has loved and how well she has loved them, suffering she’s caused and the amends she’s tried to make on the way. Everything that’s brought her to this moment.

It seems fitting, Natasha thinks, that she’s spending her night this way: quietly, in a room she abandoned years ago and then ran back to when there was nowhere else left to go. _Last night on earth_ and she’ll spend it alone. It makes her melancholy, she guesses, maybe even a little sad, but it feels more honest than forcing herself to laugh at Scott’s jokes or forcing a meaningful conversation with Bruce, who she hasn’t really spoken to in almost seven years now.

And Clint – Clint is somewhere she can’t reach him. 

Clint is lost to her in a way she’s not sure he’ll come back from even if they both survive tomorrow. If his physical body is here at the compound, the lights are dimmed so low on all the rest of him. Something vital in him blew away along with his family, but if she thinks about that, if she thinks about how there were people on that farm that she loved, too, if she lets herself process the idea that it’s not just Sam’s laugh she may never hear again if they don’t get this right, or see Wanda’s sad eyes – 

She breathes. They have to get it right.

There is nothing she can do for Clint other than what they have all chosen to do, as a team. There’s nothing else she can give him and there’s nothing else he needs from her. To Natasha, where Clint is, that’s home, but while she knows that he – loves her, he does, she knows that she matters as much as she can to someone for whom nothing really matters anymore – it’s not the same kind of home, to him.

Clint is somewhere she can’t reach him, not really, and she is out of time to try. 

When the knock at the door comes, it startles her. She’s mapped it all out, is the thing: who everyone else is with, what they’re all probably doing, and for a minute, she thinks about ignoring this attempt to include her. She could pretend she’s already gone to sleep. (No one is going to sleep tonight.)

The knocking turns more insistent, so she sets aside the book she wasn’t actually reading and opens it. 

Steve stands in the hall, his shoulders just about filling the doorframe. Big and sad and sheepish, a little, as he holds out a bottle with a label she can’t read. “Okay if I come in for awhile?” he says. 

“I thought you’d be sitting with Thor,” Natasha says. She also thought he might be trying, one more time, to put things right with Tony - _actually_ right, not just this uneasy truce they’ve settled into, but she doesn’t want to say it and poke him in a sore spot. It’s a hard thing, to genuinely surprise her.

“Someday it’s finally gonna get through your thick skull that I like you best,” Steve says, sounding almost grumpy at her reaction, and the grumpiness – how deeply, deeply endearing it is – is a large part of why she moves to allow him all the way inside. Something under her ribs feels hot and too tight; she’s touched but she doesn’t want to be. She doesn’t want something so soft this close to the surface.

Steve sets the bottle down; it’s cold, dripping beads of condensation down the side, forming a ring on the metal surface of the nightstand. He wipes a thumb through it like he’s attempting to stall the inevitable flow. “Are you scared?”

“Of dying?” she asks.

He nods. 

Natasha sits on the bed and pats the spot beside her, glad when he settles his weight against the headboard. She folds her legs beneath her and faces him. “There are worse things,” she says. “We’ve seen what worse looks like.”

Steve smiles, as though he’s glad they’ve found themselves on the same page. “Yeah,” he says. “There are some things - there’s things I think I would’ve liked to have done. But most of me just feels – ”

“Tired,” she supplies. “I know, Steve. Me too.”

He lifts an arm up, making space for her, and she surprises herself again when she goes to him immediately. Curls beneath the heavy weight of his arm, lays her head against his chest as his fingers find a home in her hair. 

“I’m so goddamn sad,” she hears herself say; unsure if this soft confessional is for Steve or herself. “I sometimes think I don’t remember what it’s like to feel anything else.”

Steve kisses the top of her head, silent agreement. 

These are the lives they’ve chosen, or maybe just the ones they stumbled into, but if they’ve never dragged themselves back out, that’s as good as a choice. These lives that mean they tried to preserve something for the rest of the world that they’ve never been able to have for themselves. They’ve hacked off oblong pieces and made those good enough, but with the clock potentially running down –

Well. It’s nice, somehow, to know that Steve’s thoughts are on the same track hers are. Wondering about the shape other lives could have taken. Things left undone. Words left unsaid. Chances now spent. 

All things considered, it hasn’t been all bad, and for the two of them, Natasha knows, _all things considered_ is a considerable amount. She’s seen sunsets from every corner of the world. She’s saved lives. She’s had friends, very true ones. Given the place she started from, it feels greedy to think there’s more she could have asked for upon coming to the end, but Steve’s right: there are still things that it would have been nice to do. Things it would’ve been nice to have.

“I don’t know if you knew this, but the first time we met, I had a little bit of a thing for you,” Steve says, after a comfortable while has passed. 

Natasha smiles and tilts her head up to look at him. “I knew,” she assures him.

Steve chuckles warm and low; she can feel it all the way through her. “Yeah, I guess you would. Nothin’ gets past you, Romanoff.”

“I’d have had a little more fun with that if it wouldn’t have seemed so much like – ”

“Playing with your food?” he suggests, and she outright laughs, a bright sound startled right out of her. “Even I knew you would have been too much for me.”

“If it’s any consolation, you would have been too much for me, too,” she says. It’s been a process, figuring out how to allow herself to be loved by someone other than a Barton; looking back, she’s not sure it’s a process she even really committed to until SHIELD fell. Steve with his sweet heart and gentle earnestness, his stubborn jaw and careful hands – he would have mangled something inside her as surely as she would have eaten him alive. They wouldn’t have known how to take care of each other. 

They might have had fun on the way, but they’d have made an unholy mess in the end. There was a reason she’d set her sights on Bruce when the loneliness had gotten too big for a time. The escape route on that was always uncomplicated.

And more to the point: both her heart and Steve’s have always been someone else’s rightful property. Hard to build much of a foundation when they’d have it in the back of their heads that that three little words from another person would _always_ be enough to blow the whole house to pieces. There’d never come a day when it wouldn’t all come apart if time opened and carried Peggy to him, if Clint had ever wanted the things Natasha did.

“I thought you were the most impressive person I’d ever met,” Steve says. “Still do, really – no matter who we add to the ranks.”

She loves him for that. It’s classic Steve Rogers, most impressive _person_. “I’d put you somewhere in my top five. Mmm – maybe top ten.”

He laughs, another startlingly bright sound. “I’m glad we’re friends,” he says, easy, guileless. “I’m glad on the other side of seventy years in the ice, you’re somebody I got to meet. I love you, Nat. Worst goes down tomorrow, something goes wrong, I wanted to know I’d said it and you’d heard it.”

This, she thinks, is one shape that her life could have taken. 

And suddenly Natasha wants to know what it would have been like, to be chosen _this way_ by somebody, by _anybody_. She wants to know what it would have been like to be a person who could have ever opened herself to the bone enough to love someone like Steve back, the way he would have needed it. She wants a glimpse of what a different definition of love might have felt like between them if he hadn’t buried his heart in 1945 and she hadn’t surrendered hers in Budapest. 

It never would have worked – she knows that. She’s not sure she would have wanted it to. 

They’ve been best friends and have taken turns being each other’s right hand, depending on who had the helm. They were meant to be exactly what they’ve been to each other, but she pushes herself up onto her knees to straddle his thighs and hovers above him anyway, because he’s here right now. Both hands at his jaw, the rasp of his cheeks against her skin and his mouth pink and soft and just a little open. Want rising in his eyes like it’s a surprise to him to feel it – it’s a surprise to her, too, this night where it’s their only chance left to be surprised by anything. 

It’s nice to feel alive. A spark of something, anything, other than the stasis of grief that’s cocooned her for too many years. 

“Could be our last night on earth,” Natasha says. “So what the hell. Want to make a really fucking stupid mistake?”

Steve’s hands are already sliding beneath her shirt and beelining for her breasts like he’s seen a green light go yellow from three blocks away. “You know something?” he says. “I absolutely want that.”

Later, they put their clothes back on because it feels too strange without them, and Steve kisses the top of her head again, smoothly transitioning them back into Platonicville like this never happened at all. She’s grateful. “You gonna be okay with Barton tomorrow?”

They’ve never talked about it, not once, not even the times when Steve has gently intimated that he knows and has never judged. But she’s never forgiven herself for that lone night with Clint, never forgiven herself for her rush of relief and then the way it felt to wake up alone in the morning when it crashed down around her. 

She has missed Clint every day for five years, and she still find herself aching for assurances he’ll never be able to give her. Her heart has only ever wanted to beat in one key. 

But she can’t beg him to feel the same way she has always felt, especially not with hope finally on the horizon. She can only ever be someone who used to be his best friend, who’s still his partner, and who will always be his biggest regret. 

“It’ll be good to run a job with him again,” Natasha assures Steve. “The rest of it – that’ll take care of itself.”

Privately, she believes she’s being reductive. They’ve all been through too much by now for the problem to be instantly fixed by undoing Thanos’s work, but a first step is a first step, and it will be the biggest one to take. 

Steve nods and reaches out to tug the ends of her braid, where it’s come a little unraveled. They aren’t on the same crew tomorrow, and after so many years as his primary partner, it feels a little weird to her, too. But at this point, after the things he’s done, there is no one else left in this complex who still trusts Clint. Who still _sees_ Clint and not just another liability, a wild card, an adrenaline junkie with a death wish. 

“It will,” Steve agrees. “Whatever Barton’s done – ”

“Careful there,” Natasha cautions, quietly, and Steve tugs her braid again. 

“Whatever else,” he says. “I know he’d never let anything happen to you.”

* * *

Natasha has never been much of a complainer, but there are so many memories she’d leave behind if she could. So many things she would love to scrape from the recesses of her brain. The flip side to that, though: she would never actively _choose_ to have anyone play with her brain, never again, and so maybe unpleasant memories are just the price a person pays for being alive.

Still. Looking around Vormir, she thinks that she’d probably be willing to lose this place. 

It’s quiet here; it feels like it should be noisy. When she and Clint arrived, the wind sheared itself against the mountains, everything was cold and cloudy and a little wild, but now it’s all so still. It’s an oppressive sort of quiet; there’s a level of expectation to it. She presses her lips together and walks forward, to the edge of the cliff, and then sits, her legs dangling over the sides. 

She’s not afraid. Not afraid to be this close to the edge, and not afraid of whatever is on its way. Maybe she should be, but wherever she is now, she’s pretty sure that she’s made a permanent home for herself on the other side of fear. 

“Long way to the bottom.”

When Natasha looks up, there’s a man standing beside her. Tall, at least from this vantage point, and when he stares down at her, she can see that his eyes are a deep inky black. He stares at her like he’s expecting her to rise to meet him. It takes a slightly awkward amount of time before he seems to realize that she’s not going to, so he lowers himself carefully to the ground at her side. 

When he’s sitting, they’re of a height. She notices the crown on his head, more of a circlet, really, burnished gold and black stones that match his eyes, and she knows his name suddenly, as though he introduced himself like a normal person.

She knocks her heels idly against the rocks, like a restless child kicking at the kitchen chair legs over a dinner that’s dragging on too long. “I didn’t ask to be sitting here, you know. I’m not trying to cheat you out of something.”

He looks almost amused. “No?”

“I’m dead,” Natasha says. “I remember it. Mostly because I was pretty straightforward about it, I didn’t make that jump with a backup plan.”

“And yet….”

Natasha laughs. It’s her real laugh, not bitter or rueful, and it alleviates the ache in her chest a little. “That should be the title of my biography. _And Yet: The Natasha Romanoff Compendium_.”

“Nobody is ever going to write a biography about you, Natasha Alianovna,” he says, almost gently. “Wasn’t that always the point?”

“They’ll write them about Steve, though, and Tony. They’ll write them about Sam and Rhodey and Carol and probably Okoye, one day,” she counters. “And if I don’t get a chapter in some of those, I’ll get footnotes. Do you think I didn’t learn how to make a life in the footnotes, Hades?”

“I think you learned how to do almost anything you ever needed to do,” he tells her. He sounds respectful. “And the last time I met someone who belonged down below as much as she belonged up above, I married her.”

“I hope you’re not here to ask me to be a sister-wife.”

“I’m here because I thought I should offer you back your choice before it’s too late. It seemed to me that you made one and it’s being upended as we speak. It’s an irregular circumstance.”

Natasha swings herself around on the mountain where she died and faces him, curious now. “People die and come back to life all the time. Defibrillators, drugs, timely intervention – ”

“Yes,” he agrees. “And you’re too clever a woman to tell me with a straight face you think this situation is in any way comparable.”

She chose to die for the person she’s loved the most. 

She’s loved Clint in every kind of way there is to love someone, steadfastly and with her whole heart. Natasha chose her own end and if she went to it with the weight of too many hard years pulling her off the mountain as much as the gravity ever did, she also went to it fearlessly, content in the knowledge that this was a good death. A better end than whatever she had been careening towards before the day she met Clint. How many people are lucky enough to know their death will have meaning – on a large scale, yes, but for the person they love? 

She thinks about how heavy she feels, some days. How much sorrow and grief has been sitting inside her, taking up space for years. How it won’t just dissipate; it all has to be worked through in pieces, bit by bit. She thinks of the people she loves who she will never see again, how that makes exhalation even harder than it already was – new grief mixed in with the old, the shallow cuts and the deeper bleeds. She thinks about how some days she is so tired. How much she has lost, and what she lost again, and what she won’t get back. She thinks about how lonely she’s been for so long.

And she thinks about hot coffee with cream, the way the grass smells right after it’s been cut. Chocolate croissants. The slow splendor of sunrise after a sleepless night. Driving too fast with nothing but open road in front of her. Long showers. Couch naps. A new leather jacket. She’s never paid enough attention to life’s little pleasures before.

Everything she has ever owed, to anyone, she has paid back. 

Now, she thinks. Now is really the first time she can say _and what about the things I owe to myself?_ and know it’s a fair question.

“I’m not done,” Natasha tells the king of the underworld. 

“You’ll be stranded, you do realize. I haven’t come to offer a bargain.”

_It feels a little like you’re trying to make one,_ she thinks, but she shrugs – stranded, she thinks, is not the worst thing. It’s maybe the only thing. “I’m not done,” she repeats. “Not yet.”

“Til we meet again, Natasha Romanoff,” Hades tells her. “I’ll check in on you from time to time.”

* * *

When her eyes open, she has the most massive migraine of her life, and she can tell she’s still on fucking Vormir. It’s not silent anymore, that whistling, cutting edge of the wind is back, and her face is cold, her vision blurred.

Panic shears through her. Because if she’s alive and she’s on Vormir, then Clint must have – did he somehow – her whole _body_ heaves with it, her heart wants to slam its way out of her chest – 

The stone’s guardian is floating off to the side, looking disinterested and exceptionally unhelpful about all of this. 

Someone catches her arm and without thinking, she spins and uses the weight disparity to flip them to the ground in a very neat breakaway that was one of the first things she ever learned as a child and still one of her more useful tricks. But when she stands over him – 

“ _Steve _?” she sputters. She is lost, completely, and there’s never been anything Natasha hates so much as she hates being behind the curve on anything. “What the _fuck_?”__

__Steve gets to his feet – easily, because he’s Steve, and before she can repeat her question, he’s yanked her into his arms and is hugging her so hard that she physically can’t speak. He’s making sounds into the side of her neck, desperate choking things, and when he finally pulls back to look at her, he lets out a noise of grief that will haunt her the next time she falls asleep. It’s like Clint’s face, Clint pleading with her not to let go of his hand, it’s too much raw grief and it’s burrowing into her on a cellular level._ _

__His hands are running over her head, her neck, the sides of her arms, and she can’t bring herself to shove him off. “Nat,” he chokes out. “Oh, Nat. Oh Jesus.”_ _

__For all she wants to soothe him, panic is building inside her, too, and she has to ball her hands into fists and thump them against his back once, twice, to bring around his attention._ _

__“Tell me he didn’t do something stupid,” she pleads. “Tell me Clint’s not down there right now _tell me_ – ”_ _

__“No one has ever returned the Soul Stone before.”_ _

___Now_ the guardian’s creepy floating ass finally decides to weigh in. _ _

__Natasha turns to look at the remnants of the Red Skull, though she can’t turn very far what with the death grip Steve has on her body. “What the fuck do you mean _returned the stone_?”_ _

__“It has never been done,” he repeats, blank eyes boring into hers. “There was no way to predict an outcome like this. The moment Clinton Barton, son of Edith, departed this realm with the stone, Steven son of Sarah – ”_ _

__“I came back with it,” Steve says, as though it’s taking enormous effort for him to pull himself somewhere coherent again. “Nat. It’s over. We won.”_ _

___We won_._ _

__“Is it a longer story than that?” she manages, and Steve laughs, a thick, wet laugh, and practically hauls her up off the ground into another hug._ _

__“Isn’t it always?” he says._ _

____

* * *

The conversation is slightly more constructive once they wander back down the mountain, away from one of the more unsettling creatures Natasha’s ever encountered in her line of work. And it _is_ a long story, an awful, ugly story. There’s no miracle coming for Tony, or the family he left behind. Everything’s always a trade, one way or the other.

But here she sits, her shoulder pressed against Steve’s. It’s 2014 and somewhere out there, back on earth and so many thousands of miles away, there’s another Steve and another Natasha, only really just starting the beginning of their story. Maybe in this same moment they’re in, she has her heels up on the dashboard of a stolen truck and he’s scolding her for it. Maybe they’re eating scrambled eggs in Sam Wilson’s two bedroom apartment. Learning how to be friends. 

That version of herself feels so young. Like a different person than the woman she is now, trying to rub the tears off her face with filthy hands.

“So,” she says. “The theory was that if all the stones were returned to the exact time and place they disappeared from…”

“Then it would nullify the timelines from splintering out into a bunch of different alternate universes,” Steve finishes. “This was the last stop. Put it off as long as I could. I didn’t really want to see this place.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispers.

Natasha says that she’s sorry so very rarely, she saves it only for the times she _means_ it. She’s not sorry that she chose herself instead of Clint. She’s not sorry for the choice she made, and she would make it again. 

But she’s sorry for thinking, on some level, that there was no one she was leaving behind. She’s sorry for what Steve’s been through, both without her and because of her. 

Steve has a larger capacity for grace than she does, though, he always has, and he takes her hand, squeezes it. “Nothing to be sorry for,” he says. “We both know I woulda done the same. Not gonna lie right to your face and say I _haven’t_ done the same. But I’m damn glad there was a reset button on it, Romanoff.”

She smiles and tips her head against his shoulder, looking out at the alien landscape stretching before them. Clint left on the ship she arrived in, it only now occurs to her; she’s not quite sure what her exit strategy is here, which seems like it should be a bigger worry. Her brain hasn’t quite grabbed onto it as a problem to solve yet, though. She’s preoccupied with the sensation of inhaling and exhaling, appreciating the fill of her lungs, the beating of her heart, the thrum of her pulse. She’s thinking of Tony and everything he gave up after her own swan dive. 

And Clint. 

“Is he okay?” she asks Steve quietly. She knows he understands who she means.

It’s a balm and a wound both when he nods. “I saw him again at the funeral,” Steve promises. “He was with his whole family. Had his arm around Laura and the daughter was holding his other hand. Said they were already working on fixing up the house in Iowa. He’s doing just fine, Nat.”

“Good,” she says, and closes her eyes, feeling them swell again. She is so fucking tired of crying. On the other side of this, she’s going to find a way to structure her life around never crying again; it’s come too easily to her in the last five years, and she misses the version of herself who almost never did this because the mechanics of it felt faulty. 

She’s never going to see Clint again, she suddenly realizes. 

If there’s a way off this planet – and that’s a big if – they’re still in a year that’s almost a full decade earlier than the one she’s come from. She can’t exactly show up at the farmhouse and tip him off to the carnival of horrors they’re about to go through once SHIELD falls, that would be just the sort of thing to splinter the timeline that they’ve taken care to prevent. And Steve is the only one left with any Pym particles – her watch has been smashed to shit in the fall. 

This is goodbye for herself and Steve, too, isn’t it, and her heart has already been so thoroughly pummeled that it’s hard to believe it even still has the ability to twist up, but there it goes. Steve has to go home eventually. But maybe if she can get out of here, she could figure out a way to hail Carol, at least. That seems like it’s still playing by the rules – Carol never explicitly _said_ that she’d never met Natasha before when she first showed up, after all, so there could be wiggle room.

When she voices that, though, Steve looks at her like she’s deranged. 

“Yeah, that’ll happen,” he says, in the sort of wry voice that surprises everyone who thinks Captain America never learned about sarcasm. “I just got you back, but sure, I’m going to leave you all by yourself, stranded with only a Nazi ghost for company. Are you out of your fucking mind?”

“I did hit my head pretty hard,” she shoots back. Steve gags, rolling his eyes, and she shoves him with her shoulder. “You’re annoying.”

“ _You’re_ annoying,” he says. “It’s you and me, Nat, okay? War’s over now. Plan’s changing.”

“I don’t have any particles,” Natasha reminds him. “We don’t have a way to get more. And if you have just enough to get you home…”

Steve looks away. 

A deliberate shifting away, he can’t meet her eyes.

“Rogers, I’m heartbroken and undead, please don’t play coy with me,” Natasha says. “I’m not at my best for translating your expressions today.”

“Okay. Yeah,” he says, and rubs a hand over his face. “I’ve got enough for one more stop before I went back. I took it without telling Banner.”

_Well, that solves the problem, doesn’t it?_ she thinks, they can figure out a way to rig the device around both their hands at the same time – her wrists are thinner than his, it shouldn’t be too much trouble – and then it hits her.

It does not take a genius to realize there are points in the past where Steve Rogers might have unfinished business and where those points are.

“Oh,” Natasha says, softly. 

“It doesn’t matter,” Steve tells her, firm. “Hey. Look at me, Nat, it doesn’t matter.”

“But it does,” she says. “If you only have two jumps left - this was your way home.”

“I wasn’t going to change anything,” Steve says, close to begging now, as though he thinks that Natasha – Natasha of all people – might not understand. “I only thought that if I could see her, if I could talk to her, then it’d somehow – it was stupid, Nat, it was self indulgent and too risky, I know, but you were dead, and Tony, and I needed _something_ , we’d won, but it felt – it feels…”

“Hollow,” she supplies. 

It shouldn’t. But it does. She understands why he would want to run somewhere it could make sense. To the only person left that he could talk to without screwing everything up, without giving everything away, who would still be able to ease the pain in him.

Everything has been such a mess for so long. For Steve, it was weeks ago, but for Natasha it was only just last night, laying in her room at the compound and both of them feeling too exhausted to keep doing this, over and over, to keep losing all the things that matter, to fail and fail and watch every win get further away and mean less. Knowing that even if they pulled this off, there would be so many things to still work through that maybe… maybe…

Maybe the only way to really be able to start over is to wipe the slate entirely clean.

_You’ll be stranded_.

The words float into her head, an echo of a whisper that sounds familiar, and she understands. 

The war’s over. Their friends are safe. Clint doesn’t need her – he’s doing fine, Steve promised. And she’s already had to make one impossible choice today. Somehow this one feels easier. She's already lost the most important person in her life. She can't do it with another one. Not like this. Not the same day. And she can't ask him to give up the only thing he's ever really wanted, the closest he's ever come to making his most private dream become a reality. Not for her. 

“I’m not going anywhere without you,” Steve says. 

Natasha sets her hand on his wrist. “Okay,” she agrees. “We’ll go together. But I think maybe…”

Steve’s brow furrows. “Nat?”

“Maybe we should talk about where that place should really be,” she says.

He’ll argue, Natasha knows. He will. But he also doesn’t swat the idea down immediately. That’s how she knows that once they're ready to use this very last time jump, they won’t be going forward.

  
  
  


to be continued.

  
  
  



End file.
